Ladies and gentlemen, the RF Generation Shmup Club now has its own official companion podcast! Shoot the Core-cast is your destination to hear all about the games we're playing each month in the RF Generation Shmup Club. Hosted by MetalFRO and Addicted, each episode will be a recap of the month's shooter game, with discussion about the game, commentary, shout-outs to forum member discussion, and highlighting scores and strategies. Couldn't join in during a month? Listen to the episode and see what you missed! Episodes 01 and 02 are now online, and you can listen to them here:

Come hear Addicted and I wax intellectual about R-Type, including its design concepts, HR Giger-inspired art, its many ports, ominous music, and its lasting impact on the genre. In our second episode, we discuss the mighty Gradius and its huge influence on horizontal shoot-em-ups, and the genre in general. We have plenty to say about these bona fide classics, so please, have a listen!

We're already listed on Google Podcasts, and will be submitting to other services in the coming weeks, so if you have a favorite service you use, stay tuned for more announcements about other platforms!

Crabby has returned, so we're geting caught up and answering plenty of your questions! Also, we talk Batman Vs Superman including plenty of spoilers, so if you haven't watched yet, see the timecode listing to skip.

Crabby is busy raising money for charity, so this episode Rich from the RFG PlayCast drops in to help us dig through your amazing questions. To prepare for the holidays, we discuss great couch co-op games to share with your loved ones!

We're back with another interview, this time it's Rob Bryant from Sly Dog Studios! We'll discuss his most recent NES homebrew release, The Mad Wizard, along with his other projects and development process. As always, your prolific questions get addressed and Bil and Crabby even manage to jam in some board game talk.

It's time to clear the air on games that we just could not bring ourselves to finish. There are titles that we feel we should have finished, but something happened along the way. Join us to learn what titles we threw in the towel on and why. Did we make a big mistake? Have you waved the white flag on games yourself? As always, great listener questions make a return. Thanks for listening!

What better way to kick off the new year than to take a look at the last one? Crabby returns to help us run down our personal top 5 games that we played in 2014. You'll hear a wide variety of favorites in this show, with only one game making it to two of our lists. Will one of your favorites make it? Be sure to listen to find out. As always our Q&A section provides some quick digression, and we appreciate them all. Thanks for listening!

Are you tired of hearing opinions on E3 yet? Well too bad, because we're here to chime in as well. We talk about the major pressers, what we think about the upcoming games, and the things we are looking forward to. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, EA, and Ubisoft all get some time with us, and maybe some of the games we discuss will even come out this year.

Who do we think did the best job? Did we get it right or wrong? Let us know!

With RFGeneration's 2013 successful donation drive being done and over, this episode is dedicated to the generous donors that helped keep the site afloat. The small scores section will be dominated by the finds from our benevolent donors that gave through the end of the drive (Feb. 1). Feeling left out this time around? Too bad you should have given us money!!!

In addition to the sites donation drive us podcasters held a little auction to raise some extra RFGen fundage for a guest spot on the show. Our lucky (that's debatable) winner was Nupoile!! His fearless and charitable spirit saw him talking with the 3 of us about what drives him to collect, how he goes about it, and why the Odyssey 2 is so amazing.

Thanks so much to everyone who chipped in in any way (not just financially) to keep improving the best gaming database on the net. This year's donation drive was successful because of the amazing community that supports RFGeneration and keeps it growing and thriving. I know were not alone in looking forward to many more years to come of sharing our fascinating hobby through the medium of RFGeneration!!

This will be your chance to talk about your collection, share your passion for the hobby, and tell Crabby yourself why Super Metroid is great (or not, I suppose if you are one of THOSE people.)

All proceeds from this auction will go directly to support RFGeneration. RFGeneration is supported solely on donations, we have zero advertisements and everything on the site is completely free. Any and all donations go strictly to paying for our server costs. Well, what are you waiting for? GET BIDDING!

We have talked at length in the past about many of the quirks involved with a collectors persona. Do those oddities manifest themselves into your gaming life also? The three of us reflect on our game playing to see if our collector mentality spills over. Apparently it hits some of us harder than others

We also hope you enjoy the extended Small Score part of the podcast! Extended?!!? Thats correct. With a few generous RFGeneration members donating enough money to the site to reach our coveted featured on the collectorcast target, weve added their latest pickups to the podcast in great detail. So take the time to listen to their finds for the month and hopefully it encourages more people to donate in order to keep the site running smoothly!

Do words like Reproduction, ROM Hack or Pirate Cart have any place in a collector's vocabulary? There are many fringe areas of collecting that may or may not find a home in your collection. How far removed from legitimate licensed releases are you comfortable with? If playing on the original hardware is important to you, is there a way to justify playing a back up of your games?

Where can you even get these things? Why would you want them? Are you still considered a collector if you partake?

Get our occasionally nonsensical take on such subjects as we explore the farthest reaches of physical media and collecting.

Interesting side note: If you listen to Episode 10 of the Collectorcast backwards, at full blast, and playing at half speed you might just hear the most sinister and unholy of words uttered straight from the depths of Hell... emulation!!

Whether you're just starting out your collecting career or you've been at it for a little while, it can be daunting to tackle an unfamiliar system. Model Revisions, 1st and 3rd party accessories, different territories, software and many other new areas are opened up for you to explore. We'll take one of the most beloved systems of all time, the NES, and break it down so that hopefully people still learning the basics about it can leave the Collectorcast with new found, and vastly useful, knowledge in their collecting quests for this classic system. As an area of focus for all 3 of our collections we hope to pool our combined knowledge and experience with the NES and show that there is a lot more to the Nintendo than one might think. But with a few tricks, a bit of research and some trial and error anyone can dive in and enjoy collecting for the NES in many different capacities if they have the desire.

As usual we'll also spend waaay too much time discussing the plethora of amazing scores that have been posted (and blogged) at RF Generation. It's becoming cliche to keep saying that this month's scores exceeded the last, but fortunately it keeps being true! So check it out and see if you made the cut this time around. And make sure to stay tuned until the end for a special announcement regarding how you can help rfgeneration.com......

Many of us are familiar with the games released for our favorite consoles. But how can you enhance your collection beyond simply obtaining retail releases? Well explore one of many answers to that question this time around by entering the realm of Homebrew titles. And to make sure we treat the subject appropriately we've sought out help. NES Homebrew Developer John White, creator of the game Assimilate, joins us to discuss his thoughts on Homebrew games.

We took this opportunity to poke and prod as much info as we could from him regarding both his game and Homebrews in general. Being a collector focused site, we of course had to get his unique perspective on the collectability of such items too.

As usual we also discuss the most interesting scores posted on the site since our last recording. With the overwhelming number of post this time around we must apologize if you feel we missed mentioning your finds. There were far too many wonderful additions to our member's collections this episode that we really had to cut it down to what we felt were the absolute best scores.

Show notes:Music: Final Fantasy III/VI (SNES)4:53 Small Scores1:12:00 Homebrew intro discussion1:35:03 Interview with John White2:50:59 Outtro

When buying, selling or trading games there is one thing that's always sure to come up: Whats this game worth to me? Pricing your game to sell can be a tricky thing. Buying at a price both the seller and buyer can agree upon, and be happy with, can be even trickier.

How important is it for trades to be equal in value? Does your relationship to someone have a monetary value when it comes to transactions? Whats a lowball and is it ever appropriate to make such an offer? What are the generally accepted methods of estimating an items price?

Join Duke, Crabmaster and Bil as we discuss how to spend your Toonies on the ever fluctuating market of secondhand video games.

We are a community of collectors, gamers and the likes, and some of us enjoy to let the world know what is on our mind. For those members, we have the community blogs, a place where they can publish their thoughts and feelings regarding life, universe, and everything. Some of those members might even choose to write about gaming and collecting! Whatever they write about, you can find it on their blog. You can either see the latest community blog entries in the feed you see to the left, or you can browse for your favorite blog using the menu above. Interested in having your own blog hosted on RF Generation? It's rather simple, first be a registered member, and then click the "My Blog" link that you see in the navigation above. Following those two steps will certainly get you on your way to blogging.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy our entries, rantings, and completely unrelated series of thoughts. We write for you to read, so we certainly hope that you enjoy our material.